Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

International Spy Museum

I went to the
International Spy Museum recently.
I recommend it. However, there were two things I spotted that I know
were incorrect. This makes their credibility as a source of information
suspect. This is too bad--- as we'll see later.

The museum has the story of
Nathan Hale.
He was a spy for the Americans during the Revolutionary War.
He was hanged and his last words were
I regret that I have but one life to give for
my country. In reality his last words were probably AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH.
Actually they were never recorded,
though some serious historians think he was the kind of guy who would say
I regret ... . Not the same as saying it.

The museums had an exhibit of
the Enigma machine.
They were trying to make the (true) point that the story of
cracking the Enigma was a secret for many years,
and hence Turing didn't get credit until later.
They phrased this as

If the story of cracking the Enigma was known earlier
then Turing would have won a Nobel Prize.

A Nobel Prize? In what? Chemistry? Physics? Literature? Medicine? Peace? Economics?
Peace (maybe its shortened the war)?
The statement is clearly false.
What they should have said was

If the story of cracking the Enigma was known earlier,
and if the Turing Award had been established,
then Turing would have likely won a Turing Award.

Having gotten these two items wrong I now turn to a question for
which I do not know the truth.

Did the Nuclear Secrets that
Julius Rosenberg
gave to the USSR
speed up the building of the USSR's nuclear bomb?

I have read YES and NO for this question. The NO that I have read
says that the biggest nuclear secret that the USSR ever got was
the fact that the bomb could be built. Hence the person who
leaked our biggest nuclear secret was... President Harry Truman.
The YES that the Spy museum said was that the USSR bomb design was
very close to the American one. What is the truth?
That's just it- I don't know!
If the spy museum had not made those other mistakes I would believe
them on this. (My believe may still have been wrong.)

9 comments:

Even if the secrets contained no technical information that said specifically how to build it, it might have yielded important information about what the Americans weren't doing, which might be almost as useful.

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"I draw your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time..."

Please do not speak of the credibility of Wikipedia... that's a wrong question to ask, the wrong way to use Wikipedia. In this case, the statement in Wikipedia is sourced to a New York Times article, which says:Echoing a consensus among scientists, Mr. Sobell also maintained that the sketches and other atomic bomb details that the government said were passed along to Julius Rosenberg by Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, were of little value to the Soviets, except to corroborate what they had already gleaned from other moles.So the question is only of the credibility of the NYT.

Hence the person who leaked our biggest nuclear secret was... President Harry Truman.This is incorrect. By the time Truman told the Soviets, Klaus Fuchs had already passed along that information and a lot more.

If the story of cracking the Enigma was known earlier then Turing would have won a Nobel Prize. How about the Fields Medal? And if not, because he didn't deserve it or because mathematicians didn't have the depth to understand the importance of his contributions?